Agra and Allahabad Under Akbar: When UP Was the Mughal Core

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The Mughal empire is filed in the world’s memory under Delhi, but for its greatest century the empire’s centre of gravity lay downstream, on the Yamuna at Agra and at the Sangam at Allahabad, and its greatest emperor spent his reign turning the territory of modern Uttar Pradesh into the imperial core. Akbar’s UP is the hinge of this batch, the moment the plain stopped being a battleground of successor states and became, once again, the seat of a paramount power.

Agra’s rise preceded the dynasty. Sikandar Lodi had moved his seat there in 1504, planting the sultanate on the Yamuna’s bend, and it was as Delhi’s twin capital that Babur took it after Panipat in 1526, laying out on its bank the first charbagh, the Persian fourfold garden, that his line would elaborate into an aesthetic of empire. But it was Akbar, enthroned as a boy in 1556, who made the city imperial in stone, replacing the old brick fort from 1565 with the colossal red sandstone fortress that still walls the river, part citadel, part palace city, the treasury and throne of an empire that stretched, by his death, from Kabul to the Deccan’s edge.

Then, in one of history’s great architectural gestures, he built a second capital from nothing. Fatehpur Sikri, raised on a ridge west of Agra from 1571 in honour of the Chishti saint Salim, whose blessing had given the emperor his heir, is the most complete surviving statement of Akbar’s mind, a city of red sandstone where Persian, Timurid, Gujarati, and Rajput idioms are fused as deliberately as the empire fused its nobilities. In its Ibadat Khana, the house of worship, Akbar staged the debates that scandalised and fascinated his age, ulema, Brahmins, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Jesuits from Goa disputing before the throne, an inquiry that ended with the emperor promulgating his own eclectic discipleship, the Din i Ilahi, and the policy that mattered far more, sulh i kul, universal peace, the abolition of the jizya and the opening of the highest offices to Rajput and other Hindu nobles, with Raja Todar Mal, whose revenue settlement became the empire’s fiscal spine, and Birbal of the folk tales among the age’s ornaments. The city itself was occupied hardly fifteen years, its water failing or its purpose served, and stands today essentially as Akbar left it, the best preserved thought experiment in Indian history.

Eastward, the emperor fixed the empire’s other anchor where this series has already stood, at the confluence. From 1583 he raised at Prayag the greatest of his forts, walling the Sangam itself and founding the city he named Ilahabas, Allahabad, seat of a new suba in the imperial reorganisation that divided the realm into provinces, three of which, Agra, Awadh, and Allahabad, cover between them most of modern UP. The plain’s revenue, measured village by village under Todar Mal’s system, was the empire’s bloodstream, and its Grand Trunk Road, refurbished from Sher Shah’s line, its artery, the heartland functioning for the Mughals exactly as this series found it functioning for every power before and since, as the treasury that paid for everything.

Allahabad’s fort promptly earned a place in the dynasty’s family drama, for it was there that Prince Salim, the saint’s namesake, established his rebel court around 1600, striking his own coins and styling himself king while his father lived, a rebellion smoothed over just in time for Salim to succeed in 1605 as Jahangir. The pattern, the heir apparent testing the throne from a UP fortress, would recur, and the province’s history under the great Mughals is threaded with such successions, up to the fratricidal war of Shah Jahan’s sons that ran partly across this ground.

Akbar died in 1605 and lies outside Agra at Sikandra, in a tomb he began himself, its gateway inscribed with a Persian verse inviting the reader into the gardens of paradise. The city he left was among the largest in the world, European travellers of the next reigns guessing its population in the many hundreds of thousands, its bazaars trading the empire’s wealth, its riverfront lined with the mansions and gardens of the nobility. One garden plot on that bank, downstream of the fort, was owned by the family of a Persian noblewoman married to Akbar’s grandson. What rose there after her death in childbirth is the subject of the next article, and the reason the whole world knows the name of Agra.